Is the selfie culture killing genuine happiness?

People now must have photos to post, even when nothing spectacular is happening in their lives (Photo: Gemini)

The selfie has become the killer of happiness. Selfie, a photograph of oneself that a person takes by holding a camera, more often a phone, at an angle, has been revolutionary.

In the past, someone else, most likely a professional, had to take your photos as you posed. This meant that people rarely saw photos of people doing things by themselves because there was no one around to take the photo. Now everyone can appear in a photo with heads raised a little towards a camera held high by the taker.

The word was in use in Australia before it went global. It was first recorded in a scientific paper presented in 2002 in Australia, from the phrase “self-serve”. In 2013, it got into the Oxford Online Dictionary as a new word. By 1990, self-photography was common among Japanese schoolgirls. It was the type of setting a camera on timer and run to pose. Until one Japanese girl held the camera in front of her and took the photo.

The rise of selfies, which came with the camera feature in mobile phones, has killed happiness. People no longer do things for their own enjoyment but to share with the public. It doesn’t make sense to share the same things and place them every month. The pressure is to appear to be travelling a lot, visiting exotic places and having more fun. This takes away happiness as the goal of human engagement and replaces it with how people will perceive it.

I have seen people change their clothes to take photos around the same venue. I was told that the photos will be shared over a long period to portray the image that they visit the venue regularly. People now must have photos to post, even when nothing spectacular is happening in their lives.

People are more concerned with the selfie than the experience. It is the talk of visiting exotic places rather than enjoying the moment. We buy goods and experiences not because we need them but to justify our position in the social hierarchy. We buy things we don’t like and visit locations we don’t enjoy just to prove that we can.

In the past, the most expensive leisure locations were exclusive. Very few photos of these locations could be found. People went to these locations to enjoy with the knowledge that no one, maybe the employees he will find there will know he visited. That is no longer the case; leisure is now conspicuous. As more and more people post photos of visiting a location, the location loses its value.

Intimate affair

Commodities depreciate just because people overshare them. It could be a good piece of food, cloth, accessory or even a certain shop. Trending is good, people get attracted to what is trending, but the concentration fleshes out by. No one is patient enough to wait and savour a taste or appreciate a product. We ask – what’s next?

I can no longer sit and watch a 15-minute video. Social media has conditioned me that 90 seconds is too long for a video. Memes and emojis are the new paragraphs and sentences, respectively. Meanwhile, important matters must be explained in detail. No wonder this generation cannot sit down in private and read a book of two hundred pages.

Lives are no longer private. If you have sections of your life that are private, congratulations. Someone will take a selfie in his house while he is eating. Something that has always been an intimate affair with close friends and family now gets to be viewed by people around the globe, some of whom they will never meet.

It is no longer about enjoying the meal and conversations around the table. It is about making a meal that is worth sharing and presenting in a unique way to pass a message. In normal times, however, they enjoy eating food from a roadside shade (kibanda), which cannot be recorded or posted.

Whenever people meet prominent people, they rush to ask for a selfie and not pitch who they are and what they do. That could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but the urge to post the moment obscures the most important thing to do. Ironically, prominent people will not take people who first ask for a selfie seriously.

The desire to share location and experiences has killed the joy of living and cherishing the moments. Could this be the reason for the rise in cases of mental health challenges? Those who share experiences of status they cannot afford have pressure to measure up.

While those who don’t have anything spectacular to share feel left out and lagging behind their peers, selfies are the masters of fake it till you make it. In the past, only people around you knew about your fake life; now the whole world knows about it.

Life is generally boring. It’s mundane and repetitive, but selfies have made us believe that everything must be spectacular. Next time you really want to buy a product, ask yourself if you really need it. If you visit a place, will you still be happy if nobody knew that you were there? How you answer these questions reveals if you are still sane in this insane world. The selfie has killed the joy of simple, private experiences.